As a recent New York Times article wryly explains, it turns out that even the nation’s technological elites—the same engineers, software designers, and idea people, who brought us Google, E-Bay, and Facebook—would prefer that their children grow up and learn in a technology-free environment.
Ostensibly a profile piece about the experience-centered and technology-free Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos California, the article interviews several parents about why they chose to send their kids to a school without any computers or other media, thus setting the scene for a discussion of the potential benefits of technology-free instruction. Situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, one would not expect the Waldorf School to be very popular. However, it turns out that many parents who make their living designing the latest technologies are not too keen on their children using them. As one parent quoted in the article succinctly put it, “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.” This aversion to technology in the classroom, however, is not held by most other parents and educators across the nation. So what do these parents know that others do not? It turns out quite a bit. For one, they know that education is not only about learning facts, but about becoming a well-adjusted and emotionally dynamic individual. They know, as one of them put it, that “teaching is a human experience,” and they know that technology, though incredibly useful in day to day life, can be a distraction in the classroom.
The article is, in fact, part of a series of recent New York Times articles exploring the use of technology in the classroom that offers a much needed critical analysis of what has thus far been a very one-sided policy debate. The belief in the value of technology in the classroom has become a kind of sacred cow of public education debates, and there are few incentives for administrators or school principals to question this orthodoxy. In fact, there are many hard-to-resist political and monetary incentives (mostly from the corporate world) that encourage technology use in public schools. While it turns out it’s very difficult to actually improve student learning and attention through the use of technology, purchasing a set of new Dells or IPads for the classroom, or signing students up for Facebook or Twitter, is an easy way to show parents and politicians that their schools are on the cutting edge; and who doesn’t want to be on the cutting edge? Indeed, even as many public schools struggle to keep teachers and restrict class sizes, they seem more than willing to continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on corporate-manufactured technologies for the classroom in an attempt to demonstrate that they care about their students. Like an absent parent, who compensates by buying their child all of the latest gadgetry—with which they can then entertain themselves in their parents’ absence—our public schools seem trapped in a cycle of simultaneous neglect and harmful overcompensation. But as this particular article makes plain, the most important forms of learning do not actually require any technology.
Indeed, as it turns out, technology might even get in the way of important forms of learning. The Waldorf schools, which value human interaction and emotional development, have been around for a long time. However, their ability to continue to thrive and grow within a world that is increasingly technologically focused says something about the still small voice of emotion and the animal desire for physical forms of connection and meaning that persist within human communities. And what is most interesting about the Waldorf schools’ approach to learning—its emphasis upon the body—is precisely what is missing from so much recent technology-centered pedagogy. Teachers in the Waldorf schools encourage children to integrate physical activity into the curriculum, thus reintegrating body and mind in the process of learning. In contrast, technology-centered pedagogies, which require little physical movement and lots of focused mental attention, actually encourage a split between the body and the mind, privileging the mental, linguistic, and visual aspects of our experience over the interpersonal, intuitive, and somatic aspects. The negative effects of this split will no doubt become increasingly apparent as generation upon generation of children are increasingly raised in the constant presence of computer screens and digital forms of entertainment and information that encourage interaction without the complications of interpersonal communication; information without any organic context; and isolation without introspection.
In a world where children’s emotional experiences are increasingly manufactured and often mediated through technology, the Waldorf School’s emphasis upon the body as a vital part of experience and learning is more necessary than ever. Sadly, at least according to the reporting in this article, those benefitting most from the lack of technology in their schools also appear to be among the wealthiest and most privileged. Meanwhile the rest of the nation’s children, whose parents cannot afford the $17,000 a year price tag to attend a Waldorf school, remain the victims of a system whose desire to appease corporate and political interests seems to have overwhelmed their ability to actually teach. As schools in historically underprivileged districts spend their resources in a vain attempt to keep up with the latest technology, they are throwing away perhaps their one chance to offer a real solution to the increasing opportunity gap between the rich and the poor. As technology becomes more efficient and simultaneously more self-evidently easy to use, the real winners will be those who have the deep emotional and imaginative skills to navigate the pitfalls of this new world. Those trained only in the use of technology on the other hand, will likely find themselves its unwitting victims.
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